50000 Data Points an Hour

One of the biggest changes to education in the last few years has been the emphasis on feedback. The challenge then becomes how to be equitable with time and energy. The solution, algorithms.

“DreamBox Learning tracks a student’s every click, correct answer, hesitation and error — collecting about 50,000 data points per student per hour — and uses those details to adjust the math lessons it shows. And it uses data to help teachers pinpoint which math concepts students may be struggling with.

Mr. Hastings described DreamBox as a tool teachers could use to gain greater insights into their students, much the way that physicians use medical scans to treat individual patients. “A doctor without an X-ray machine is not as good a doctor,” Mr. Hastings said.”Source

Using various applications to provide automated feedback forces the question as to what education should involve and be about.